The second week of Obamacare enrollment started a lot like the first: with error messages.

Glitches continued crippling online enrollment in new Obamacare exchanges on Monday, despite assurances by the White House that the consumer experience would markedly improve this week.

The Obama administration deployed senior officials over the weekend to emphasize that problems on the enrollment site, HealthCare.gov, were primarily the result of intense interest from prospective enrollees. But their claims were undercut by a Sunday evening Wall Street Journal report claiming serious design flaws in the system’s infrastructure.

The administration said Monday that website work is ongoing, and officials sought to downplay reports of malfunctions.

“The work done to increase access to HealthCare.gov in light of the overwhelming demand is beginning to show results,” said Health and Human Services spokeswoman Joanne Peters in a statement. “Call center wait times are seconds, not minutes, and people have been enrolling over the phone 24/7. Our work to expand the site’s capacity has led to more people successfully applying for and enrolling in affordable health coverage online, with wait times being shortened by approximately 50 percent since Friday. But we won’t stop until the doors to HealthCare.gov are wide open, and at the end of the six-month open enrollment, millions of Americans gain affordable coverage.”

On Friday, HHS declared “the system is working” and contended that by today, after a weekend of technical maintenance, “there will be significant improvements in the online consumer experience.” An HHS official confirmed that maintenance would continue overnight tonight, taking the website offline during off-peak hours.

Insurers, meanwhile, are reporting that they’ve begun receiving Obamacare enrollments — including some from the faulty online system — but haven’t yet been able to gauge whether those able to sign up are the exception or the rule.

A top administration official confirmed Monday morning it could be at least weeks before the public would get an update on enrollments in health plans sold through the federal-run insurance marketplaces. Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, claimed the administration itself doesn’t have a clear view of how many have enrolled.

“We’re going to release those numbers monthly like we do with other medical data,” Sperling said at Monday morning’s POLITICO Playbook Breakfast. “The truth is we don’t have that information now.”

Attempts by POLITICO reporters to log into the system and peruse health plan options were met with a variety of error messages and failures. At times, the system malfunctioned during log-in attempts. Other times reporters could log in smoothly. But after the log-in, the systems’ identity verification procedures prevented access to the menu of available health insurance options.

However, state-run exchange websites in Maryland and California — where consumers also had trouble logging on last week — seemed to be running more smoothly Monday morning. Their websites almost instantly responded to requests to create accounts. Vermont’s exchange, though, appeared to have log-in problems early Monday afternoon.

Most Americans seeking to enroll in subsidized insurance plans through Obamacare exchanges will be processed by healthcare.gov. Only 14 states and Washington, D.C., built their own websites, and they’ve reported fewer glitches than the federal system has experienced.